Hunter S. Thompson: His Last Shotgun Art. No More Fear And Loathing In Woody Creek. Uncle Duke From: Gary Trudeau – Doonesbury Hunter S. Thompson, the counter culture ‘gonzo’ journalist, died on February 20, 2005 by a weapon of his choice. The inventor of Shotgun Art and Shotgun Golf fatally shot himself at his Owl Creek farm in Woody Creek, Colorado. He was 67. ‘Prince of Gonzo’ he called himself, ‘Doctor Gonzo’, ‘Doctor of Journalism’, ‘Outlaw Journalist’, ‘Doc’, ‘The Duke’: Hunter Stockton Thompson (Louisville, Kentucky, 1939). Rock star of the written word. And as with rock stars meeting one is never an easy task. But we managed, once, after endless waiting and drinking our way into the local bar, The Woody Creek tavern. The sun was already sinking behind the Rocky Mountains, bathing the area around the Tavern in a chill and cheerless light, when finally the great Doctor made his appearance. Five in the morning would have been a more approriate time. Word had it that Thompson was burned out. That, battle weary, he’d given up on the Gonzo cause. Gonzo comes from the French-Canadian word gonzeaux which means something along the lines of shining path. Hunter Thompson was that path; the only fully fledged grand master of Gonzo. His Gonzo style was often confused with New Journalism, made famous by Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. But that is quite incorrect. Wolfe and the like attack the truth with the techniques of the novelist. They lose themselves in the minds of their subjects. Thompson lost himself in his own mind, and traced only his own madcap, hallucinatory journey through the many events in his stories. “It’s essentially a ‘what if’,” as P. J. O’Rourke, another Rolling Stone celebrity, quoted Thompson. The style evolved in 1970 when he failed to meet a deadline and in blind panic sent in his notes instead. They were greeted with cheers. The article‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’ appeared in Scanlan’s Monthly in June 1970. An inflammatory story apparently written at one sitting. It covers the horse race, the failure of the American Dream and, of course, Richard Nixon. Because Gonzo is not just a style of journalism, it is a battle for the preservation of Freedom and the American Dream. The Gonzo cause. And that is inextricably bound up with politics. The basis for his political involvement was formed in 1968. A year earlier Thompson had published ‘Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs’, and the book had caused considerable upheaval. Editors of the most famous magazines were queueing up to hire him. That year the magazine Pageant gave him an assignment to write a piece about Nixon’s political resurrection. (Nobody expected him to return to the political arena after his defeat by Kennedy in 1960.) Having arrived in New Hampshire, where Nixon was campaigning, it turned out to be impossible to speak to the man in person. Nixon had instructed his staff that he would not speak about Vietnam or political campus demonstrations. No, the furthest he would go was to talk to an insider about football. While the Republican candidate was preparing for the drive to the airport, a campaign worker remembered that Thompson knew all there was to know about sport. He and he alone was allowed to come along. Nixon had the edge on him with his knowledge, but Thompson could respect that. Nevertheless, the two could never get along from that moment on. More to the point, Thompson found his journalistic raison d’être, although neither of the two realised it at the time. In the July issue of Pageant 1968 the article appears “Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll”. In August of that year Thompson was present at the historic Democratic Convention in Chicago. A pitched battle between police and anti-Vietnam demonstrators broke out outside the convention hall. In the confusion Thompson fell through a glass door and was injured. Weeks later he still could not speak about the incident without bursting into tears: his faith in politics had been irrevocably damaged. He realised the futility of national politics and decides, from that moment on, to concentrate solely on his own home ground: what had been personal became political. “I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast,” he announced. ‘It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place,’ the Doc wrote a quarter of a century later in ‘He was a Crook’, the obituary he penned for Nixon from Woody Creek upon the man’s descent into hell. ‘He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American (…) that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.’ The Tavern was Thompson’s home base. It is a wooden construction that wouldn’t look out of place in a road-movie. Outside, above the door, a stuffed wild boar replete with yellow spectacles and decorated with coloured lights inspects the clientele. Next door to the Tavern is the post office and apart from that there’s no more to Woody Creek than a few substantial remote wooden houses and a trailer camp. The Tavern is Woody Creek. It’s a ten minute drive to the airfield serving the fashionable ski-resort Aspen, frequented mostly by private jets. Inside there is a pleasantly decadent atmosphere. You’re conspicuous wearing anything other than a lumberjack shirt and cap. Both men and women walk around in cowboy boots and all the regulars appear to have accepted postponement of their own American Dream. Comfort is to be found in the whining country music continually blaring out of the loudspeakers. And in the booze, of course. The walls are filled with newspaper cuttings and photographs, paintings of wild-west scenes, an enormous stuffed shark, pictures of legendary baseball players and postcards from every corner of the world. At the back there’s a pool table. From one end of the ceiling to the other there’s a string from which hang hundreds of little pink pigs. At the bar, folk speculate amusedly about how long the Doc has to go in this far from perfect existence, the wildest stories circulate concerning both his liver and his nose cartilage. And stories about Thompson are what keep and maybe will keep the Tavern running: dozens of Doc-heads visit this structure every year, hoping to catch a glimpse of their hero, mostly in vain. There’s even a Doc-corner decorated with pieces of text from the Rolling Stone, the rock magazine that published many of his searches for the Dream; and assorted articles from the local press and dozens of snapshots. At the bar they will, swear Thompson was quite prepared to shoot trespassers on his property. The Thompson-corner is dominated by the famous photograph that Annie Leibovitz took of him in 1987: Hunter stretched out on a Harley Davidson, his eyes fixed thoughtfully heavenward behind his dark pilot’s glasses, short trousers, white knee length socks, and tennis shoes, taking a drag on a Dunhill in a cigarette holder wedged between his thin lips. We had brought a bottle of Chivas Regal for the special occasion. One of his favourites. We would’ve gladly brought him some skunk, but were afraid the American authorities wouldn’t have let us get away with it. A fear encouraged by Thompson himself, he had a healthy respect for the American customs officers. In the hilarious title story of his book ‘The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. Gonzo Papers Vol.I’ he went to Mexico in 1974 for Playboy to cover the cruise and international fishing tournament at Cozumel. As he had hidden a quantity of drugs left over from another story in a nearby hotel, the assignment appealed to him. Together with his friend Yail Bloor Thompson leaves for Mexico, where the two are quickly bored to death after just a day and a half on a boat. But then things began to liven up, parties, enormous quantities of drink, coke, LSD, and speed. After a short time they didn’t know whether it was day or night. Mostly night. They were not there for the fishing although they did make one valiant attempt in the struggle between man and shark. The sharks were nowhere to be found. Thompson and Bloor decided it was time to flee the picturesque town of Cozumel leaving a trail of unpaid bills behind them. “ There’s only two things I’ve never done with drugs: sell them or take them through Customs,” Thompson confessed to Bloor on the flight to Denver. Bloor couldn’t believe his ears, knowing the lethal amount of pills and powders contained in Hunter’s suitcase. The first stop was Monterrey, Texas. And the nearer they got, the more it began to dawn on Thompson that Texas does not go easy on drugs smugglers. He had a brilliant idea, they would eat all the drugs. After a few mescaline tablets, six LSD tablets, one and a half grammes of pure cocaine, four joints, ten speed pills and some MDA (the hallucinatory little brother of MDMA or XTC, – ed.) they stumbled out of the aeroplane. At the bar the two friends calmed themselves with a few margaritas laced with tequilla.